American author (1929- )
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Where there's property, there's theft.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading", Harper's Magazine, February 2008
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest